Food Cost Calculator For Recipes

In a restaurant, catering business, or any food-related business, calculating the cost of a recipe is essential to ensure a healthy profit. Our Recipe Food Cost Calculator is a tool that helps you estimate how much it costs you to make a dish, calculate the cost per portion, set your desired profit margin, and also determine the ideal price you should charge based on your target food cost percentage.

What Is a Recipe Food Cost Calculator?

A Recipe Food Cost Calculator is an online tool that is used to estimate how much it costs to make a recipe or dish, including ingredient costs, waste, and additional costs. Based on the values you enter — such as recipe yield, total ingredient cost, waste percentage, additional costs, and more — the calculator shows you a detailed breakdown:

• Total Recipe Cost (including waste)
• Cost per Portion
• Recommended Selling Price
• Profit per Portion

How to Use This Recipe Food Cost Calculator

Using this calculator is simple. You just need to fill out the appropriate values in each field, and the calculator will instantly give you the results. Let's dive into an example to understand how it works.
Suppose you're a chef making a pasta dish for your restaurant, with the following values:

• Recipe Yield: 10 portions
• Total Ingredient Cost: 100 dollars
• Waste Percentage: 10%
• Additional Cost per Portion: 0.5 dollars
• Target Food Cost %: 30%

The calculator will instantly calculate and show the result below, but to understand how it works, let's compute the values using the formula to see the result:

1. Total Recipe Cost = 100 dollars × (1 + 10 / 100) = 110 dollars
2. Cost per Portion = (110 dollars / 10) + 0.50 dollars = 11.50 dollars
3. Recommended Selling Price = 11.50 dollars ÷ 0.30 = 38.33 dollars
4. Profit per Portion = 38.33 dollars - 11.50 dollars = 26.83 dollars

So, we have calculated that you should charge 38.33 dollars per portion to fulfill your desired profit goal of 30%.